“Charlie, against all odds”: the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo filmed daily

In 2006, Jérôme Lambert and Philippe Picard filmed the preparation of the famous issue of the publication of the caricatures of Mohammed. They made a film about it, Charlie 712, cover story. It is these images, nine years before the attack of January 7, 2015, which open this new documentary, on the reconstruction of the satirical newspaper. Cabu, his improbable bowl cut and his colorful shirt, Tignous, behind his big glasses, the serious look of Philippe Honoré open this film, which does not focus on the evolution of the newspaper, but on the conditions of its reconstruction.

“France is the only country where there can be Charlie Hebdo. I don’t see any other.”exclaims Wolinski. This scene, which grips the heart, ten years after the attack on rue Nicolas-Appert follows that where we discover the current editorial team, filmed since September 2024, with a particular process: the directors posed, for several months , microphones in the hypersecure editorial staff, and the designer Juin illustrates them. Then Jérôme Lambert and Philippe Picard gathered the members of the editorial staff in a room, whom they questioned in turn.

“I know why I am Charlie”

This film tells of a reconstruction, the way in which the attack “became a historic event”said Riss. The terrorists killed “a whole generation” tutelary figures, underlines the director of the publication, injured during the attack. “ Overnight, I became an old man. The old ones have disappeared. We had to convey, without wasting time, to the young people who are arriving, what Charlie Hebdo was.”he emphasizes.

By drowning yourself in work, as the designer Coco notes, but also by being aware that “Charlie is made to have enemies, he is a framework of resistance”notes the newspaper’s science journalist, Antonio Fischetti. By not being fooled, either, by all the newspaper’s manipulations. Like Cabu’s famous headline on “Mahomet overwhelmed by fundamentalists”, including Gérard Biard, journalist who collaborates with Charliestates: “In order not to understand this headline, you must not want to understand it. »

It is especially young people who tell their Charlie current: Biche, Juin, Yovan Simovic talk about their relationship to current affairs, to press cartoons, to these big names. Very young and then in work-study program, the latter was very shaken by the trial of Peter Cherif, which he followed on behalf of the newspaper, and the vision of the video surveillance images of the day of the attack. Until then, “the Charlie Hebdo fight was very intellectualized for me. I know why I am Charlie, for a certain number of values. I also knew what happened. But seeing it very concretely took a toll on me and the fight is different.”

From the Mazan trial to the upheavals of the dissolution of the National Assembly, from a poll on Charlie to the appointment of Bayrou’s government, the documentary follows a living, wounded editorial team, whose struggles we may not share, but which is still standing. And it was not won. The terrorists have lost.

Charlie, against all odds, France 2, 12:10 a.m., Wednesday January 8